[Haskell-cafe] Policy for taking over a package on Hackage

[wren ng thornton]

On 5/25/11 1:56 PM, Antoine Latter wrote:
> On May 25, 2011 12:50 PM,<quick at sparq.org>  wrote:
>> Quoting Antoine Latter<aslatter at gmail.com>:
>>> The only thing I'd add would be the additional actions "ReplacedBy",
>>> "ExtendedBy" and "RedesignedBy".
>>
>> I was actually thinking that this was the part that HackageDB could do
>> automatically on the page that the actionBy applied to. There should be
>> enough
>> information in the DB (somewhat like Roel's reverse dependencies work) and
>> the
>> alternative would be having to re-release a package (that you don't
>> necessarily
>> own) to add the actionBy field.
>
> I wanted the second set because I may want to establish the link even if I'm
> not the maintainer of the second package.
>
> I would imagine that the second set of actions would be otherwise identical,
> and the link would show up on either package regardless of which set of
> verbs was used.

Exactly. Sometimes the new package designer may be unaware of the prior 
art, or may be too timid to declare obviating another's work.

Also, allowing for both sides to declare the link can help to serve as 
verification of the relationship. If someone uploads the 'awesome' 
package which declares itself to replace everything on Hackage, should 
we just accept it at face value? Moreover, a feature like this new field 
would be useful for pruning the list of packages shown on the index, but 
do we want to allow the maintainer of package A to simply fiat that 
package B shouldn't be shown on the index anymore?

We have a nice community, but security and validation are still good 
things to plan into the design.

-- 
Live well,
~wren